Gin
by sido4727
Summary: North and Bunny have a tradition to play Gin once every year at the Pole. What's different this year? Jack is here! What happens with the curious spirit around? Read to find out!


Jack shuffled out of his room at the Pole, mumbling to himself and rubbing his eyes. North's yelling from the other room could often be heard through the many walls of the North Pole, and that was no exception today as it woke the Winter Spirit up from his usual summer sleep.

With his eyes half open, he sleepily walked through the maze of hallways. He yawned and nearly tripped over multiple elves (which he would've froze had he had the energy) as they scrambled along in front of him. All the while North's hearty laughter grew louder with each step, and it was almost deafening to Jack's ears as he rounded the last corner into the meeting room.

"North!" he half-whined half-yawned as he stepped into view. "What's with the yelling?"

He glanced around in sleepy surprise, noticing the table with cards strewn across it and a couple glasses and a pitcher full of what he assumed was eggnog. What surprised him more was who was sitting at the table, which oddly had a floor-length white tablecloth over it.

North and Bunny sat across from each other, the former sounding triumphant (Jack guessed that he was showing it, but the Russian's back was to him) and the latter looking extremely annoyed.

"Bunny?! What are you doing here?" Jack asked.

"Losing!" North said, a big smile across his face as he turned to look at the boy.

"Mate, it's only been one box!" Bunny retorted.

"So what? You lost 30 points!"

Irritated, Bunny rolled his eyes. "I still have two more boxes North! That was just a warm up!"

"What was just a warm up?" Jack asked, now fully awake as he walked to the table.

Bunny glanced at him. "You ever played gin?"

Jack raised a brow. "Isn't that a type of drink?"

North's hearty laugh made the boy jump. Bunny chuckled with him. "No, not gin the drink. Gin the card game."

Jack gave him a confused frown. "Card game?" he asked.

"You see," North said, standing up and wrapping an arm around the boy's shoulders, "it is tradition that Bunny and I play cards once a year and once a year only."

Jack glanced at him. "What for?"

Bunny shrugged. "We've been doing it for hundreds of years. It's not that big of a deal."

"Didn't seem like it," Jack replied as his eyes moved to the table. "So what is gin?"

"Well," North began before Bunny could make a snarky reply, "it's… it's… here. Come! Watch me play." He flamboyantly waved Jack over to his side of the table.

"Oh no," Bunny said, leaning forward in his chair with a smirk, "do you wanna learn how to win or not?"

Jack glanced from him to his opponent and back again. "No offense Bunny, but I think I'm gonna stick with North for this one."

"Ha!" North grinned, getting ready to boast again.

Bunny rolled his eyes, losing patience with North's bragging. "Fine," he said, "but be prepared to lose it all." He folded his arms as he leaned back in his chair, tilting it on its back legs. "Shuffle the cards, mate."

After North shuffled and Bunny cut the cards, North dealt them as the pair explained how gin worked. The Russian picked up his cards and held them up for Jack to see.

"You see, Jack," he started. "I have 10 cards. To gin, I must have 2 runs of 3 cards and 1 run of 4."

Jack frowned in confusion as he looked over North's shoulder. "Which is…?"

Bunny raised a brow. "Haven't you ever played a card game before?"

"Go fish," Jack said bluntly.

"That explains it," Bunny said. He leaned forward and pointed to North's hand. "So look at North's cards. Do you see red and black cards?"

Jack looked down to the pieces of paper in North's large hand. He had 6 red cards and 4 black.

"Yes," he said.

"Look at the symbols in the corner of them. Red hearts and diamonds, black spades and clubs. There's a number or letter next to them. Those will form the runs."

Jack looked at North's cards again. He had a six, a queen, an ace, and a four of hearts; a three, a two, and a five of diamonds; and a king, a queen, and a jack of black cards.

"Uh… what's the difference between spades and clubs?" Jack asked.

"Spades look like shovels," North said.

Jack looked a third time. Shovels. Yep, those were spades.

"OK," Jack said.

"Right," Bunny continued, tilting his chair on its back legs once more. "Either you can have three or four of any cards, let's say a two. Or it can be, say, an ace, a two, a three, and so on of any suit."

"So it has to be a sequence of cards if it's in the same suit?"

"Yep. Exactly."

"Now you can also go down on a card," North said.

"What's that?" Jack asked.

"North, let's not go there," Bunny said.

"But-" North began. He stopped after Bunny gave him a look.

Jack glanced from one to the other with confusion. Noticing, Bunny explained.

"That's the way North likes to play. You should learn how to gin first," he said, giving North a pointed look with the suggestion.

He grabbed the top card from the stack that was sitting at the center of the table. Flipping it over, he set it down so that it was face up. Jack raised a brow.

"Four of diamonds," ha said, glancing at North.

Keeping his usual serious face, Bunny dwarfed the card with his large paw and exchanged it for a five of spades. He glanced at his opponents.

"Let the games begin."

* * *

Minutes later, North grinned and slammed a card on the table, causing everything in the room to jump.

"GIN!" He shouted, pushing himself up and doing a little dance reminiscent to the one he did when they had been collecting teeth.

"What?" Bunny sputtered in disbelief as Jack chuckled at his surprised face.

North raised his glass of eggnog in the rabbit's direction.

"Pleasure doing business with you!" he said with a swig.

"You lost, Kangaroo!" Jack chimed in with a laugh.

"Rack off, ya esky!" the Aussie muttered.

He piled his cards on the table and began to mentally count them up. North whistled, apparently counting with him.

"Sixty-two points. Bunny, I expect better of you."

"Shut it!"

Bunny grabbed a pencil and turned to a piece of paper to write down the score. Curious, Jack jumped over the table to see what the Pooka was doing. As he did so, North suddenly moved to sit in his chair and hit Jack's foot with his ginormous shoulder. As a result, Jack toppled, but caught himself by swinging his feet forward...right into North's glass of eggnog.

Bunny yelped in surprise, much like he had the many times Jack had frozen his ears together. The entire contents of the glass had cascaded onto the grumpy animal, covering him with a new sticky coat.

Everything froze. The room went so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The tension was so high you could cut it with a knife. Everyone was expecting all hell to break loose.

Jack stared in horrified silence for a long moment, waiting along with the room for Bunny's backlash. He knew it was coming; this wasn't the first time something along these lines had happened. He bit his knuckle as he stepped from the tabletop to the floor, praying it wouldn't be that bad.

North stared in the same horror, but also a little bemused with the situation. Honestly, he found the whole thing hilarious but thought it better to wait just in case Bunny's anger turned on him. He had known Bunny long enough to know that.

Said creature, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out what had happened. He stared down at himself in shock, not saying a word and only added to the tension. He pieced together what had happened and chuckled inwardly. He'd been expecting something like this from Jack and wasn't that surprised now that it had happened.

"Really? You had to do that, didn't you?" he said with a touch of dry sarcasm.

North chuckled as Jack gave him a smirk. "Whoops! Sorry Bunny!"

Bunny groaned as he stood up. "I'll go clean up. North, show him how to keep score."

With that, Bunny left the pair to themselves. North showed Jack how to write down the score as a couple elves replaced an empty plate of cookie crumbs with fresh ones. Another one began wiping up the eggnog while North shuffled the deck.

"Bunny isn't a good card player, is he?" Jack commented a few minutes later, taking said Guardian's chair.

"No," North replied,"but sometimes I let him win."

"I heard that," Bunny said accusingly as he hopped back into the room.

"Ah! Bunny!" North said nervously to a pair of rolled eyes. "I didn't expect you so soon."

Bunny cut the cards. "Let's play." He glanced over at Jack, who hadn't moved from his lazy position in his chair. "Outta my chair."

The boy gave him a seemingly blank stare. "Hm?"

Bunny saw the joking glow through the blue eyes, so he grabbed the chair and with a quick move he tipped it over. Jack, unhappily, was forcefully abdicated from his seat with a yelp and sore backside when he landed.

"WHAT WAS THAT FOR?" he whined, pouting at his friend, who ignored him and sat back down.

When he received silence as his answer, he sighed dramatically and made a show of standing up. He looked over Bunny's shoulder and watched as the game continued, still trying to figure out how the game worked. From what he could tell, the Guardian had a great hand, and was about to gin when-

"GIN! I WIN!" North danced around again at his third or so win in a row. Jack shot a glance at Bunny, whose face was now unreadable as he watched his opponent dance. He set his own cards down.

"Alright, mate. Let's see those cards," he said.

Jack thought he caught a hint of accusation in the Aussie's voice as North gave them a smug smile. The large man waved his arm across the table, spreading his cards like a blackjack dealer in Vegas. Bunny's eyes scrutinized everything, his sharp green eyes analyzing every card.

"Seems right to me," Jack said nonchalantly, observing the cards casually alongside Bunny.

He could tell that his friend didn't agree. He watched as Bunny's eyes moved from the cards to the tablecloth they were laid upon, obviously smelling a rat.

"Bunny! What is matter?" North asked, leaning forward on the table.

His opponent didn't answer. Instead he stood up and walked over to North's side of the table, eyes still not leaving the cloth.

North chuckled nervously, not moving away. "What are you doing? he asked.

Curious, Jack followed Bunny's lead on the opposite side of the table. Bunny usually wasn't wrong when he had a hunch, and Jack knew that the rabbit probably had one. And North's nervous laughing wasn't helping his case. Bunny suddenly stopped and turned around, heading to the center of his side.

"Jack, help me," he said, putting his paws under the table ledge.

Jack put his staff down and did the same on the opposite side, now puzzled. He followed Bunny's lead, lifting the table and bringing it towards himself when his friend pushed it in his direction.

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait," North said quickly. "Bunny! What are you-?"

Bunny triumphantly set down the table and spun around. "Care to explain?" he spat with a glare.

Jack jumped on top of the table to see. He raised his brows in surprise when he saw elves scurrying away from what had been their hiding spot. There was one left that stood like a deer in the headlights of a car, staring up at them like it had just gotten caught doing something bad. Cards lay strewn about on the floor around it, face up, as if the elf had been looking for a specific one…

North struggled to find an answer. "I… they… they were playing their own game, I swear."

Jack bent down to pick up a card and looked at the back. "Same cards," he said. He glanced up at North and Bunny, the former looking extremely nervous and the latter now looking furious.

Bunny turned on North, getting in his face. He looked about ready to claw Santa's eyes out. The latter held his hands up.

"Now Bunny, let's not do something we could regret…" he said, backing away.

"North ya cheatin' BASTARD!"

* * *

 **Wow it took forever to do this but here's my card game story!**

 **Please remember that the way I play gin is probably different from yours, so if you get confused I'm sorry!**

 **I tried to be as clear as I could.**

 **Please read, rate, and review!**

 **:)**


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